Winning the Game, Losing the Hunt
by Speed of Darkness
Summary: Sequel to The Game, The Hunt, and somehow even more...whatever the first one was. If an exasperated Slender dealing with some exasperating sort-of prey sounds like something you'd like to read, then look no further! Rated T for excessive references to college physics not suitable for young children (and mild language).


**Author's Note: This is the sequel to ****_The Game, The Hunt_****, which I wrote to amuse a couple of my friends and had absolutely no plans to continue until a bunch of people pleaded and bribed and flattered me into changing my mind. If you haven't read the other story, this one will seem even more nonsensical than it does already. If you don't know me in real life (i.e. if you're not "Kristen" or "Joslyn") then you will not get all of the inside humor.**

* * *

"Oh my Tolkien, you brought TahQuisha!" Kristen exclaimed when she saw her friend hop out of her shiny black jeep, a little coconut truffle of a puppy hopping out behind her.

"Her name is not 'TahQuisha'!" Joslyn said indignantly, scooping the tiny white dog into her arms. A conspiratorial expression fell upon her face, and she added in a low voice, "And we might need Vicious on this trip—that is, a guard dog in case our friend decides to get as violent as you claim he does."

"Uh huh, you see, the thing is, Jos," the short redhead said with her default tone of heavy sarcasm as she heaved her giant overstuffed Vera Bradley backpack into the jeep, "I did say that having a guard dog might be, like, not a bad idea, but you have three dogs"—these she ticked off on her fingers—"One big, smart chocolate lab, one obese and temperamental labradoodle, and then TahQuisha, who is reminiscent of a vanilla cupcake. So why in the name of Tolkien would you pick her over either of the giant ones that would kill me if they sat on me?"

"Have some faith in Vicious; she lives up to her name! Isn't that right, Vicious?"

Joslyn giggled and spluttered as a little pink tongued attacked her face.

"Do you have everything?" Kristen asked wearily.

"Yep!"

"Tent?"

"Check!"

"Sleeping bag?"

"Check!"

"Flashlight?"

"Check!"

"Food?"

"Bananas and peanut butter!"

"Good enough. Guard dog?"

"Check!" Joslyn said at the same time that Vicious cried "Arf!"

"Then let's go."

The quest to find Slender had begun.

* * *

"I hate the world," complained Kristen after two hours of walking through the woods with her giant backpack on her back and Vicious running circles around her.

"Bright side: you're not doing physics homework," Joslyn contributed oh-so-helpfully.

"But I am _experiencing_ physics," Kristen argued. "Gravity is assaulting my backpack."

"You are _burdened_ with a _glorious_ backpack. What's even in there?"

"That's a mystery," came the flippant yet enigmatic reply.

"Well, it won't be much longer; it's twilight—"

"Eeewwwww." Joslyn was cut off by her friend's good taste in literature.

"Ex_cuse_ me. It's _almost night_, and we're officially lost in the woods. I'm sure we'll see him soon."

"If we're sufficiently lost, can we stop and set up camp while it's still light enough to see?"

That suggestion made a startling amount of sense. "Oh. I didn't think of that," Joslyn admitted, dropping what she was carrying.

"That's why you need me—for life's precious blonde moments." Kristen sat down next to her bag and was immediately attacked by Vicious.

"I'm not blonde!" Joslyn objected. "And at least I've got a soul!"

Kristen narrowed her eyes and did not dignify that comment with a response.

"So how are we going to set up this tent?" the non-blonde asked.

"Well—wait, where _is_ the tent?" Kristen jumped up, displacing the puppy, and stared with dismay at the pile of stuff that they had just carried through the woods.

"Weren't you carrying it?"

"I thought you had it!"

"It's still in the jeep, then."

Kristen thought of something else. "Where did we leave the jeep?"

"At a random, insignificant, and secluded location on the edge of the forest that we will certainly be able to find again without any difficulty. Where else?"

"In retrospect, Jos, that might not have been the best idea."

Joslyn could see her point. "So what do we do now?"

* * *

When the sun did set, two girls and an animated puff of white fur were huddled in sleeping bags on the forest floor.

"It's dark," Joslyn observed.

"No shit, Legolas."

"Maybe he'll come soon!"

"You should wait up for him!" Kristen suggested with false cheeriness. "Wake me if anything spectacular happens."

It was quiet for a while after that. Joslyn stared out into the impenetrable darkness and absentmindedly petted the dog nestled in her sleeping bag. She could faintly see the white fur in the extreme darkness, and she was tempted to dig a flashlight out of one of the bags. However, she was also deeply offended by flashlights, as she had recently come to associate them with physics. Deciding that rummaging through their stuff would be too much trouble anyway in the dark, she rose and crept away to seek Mr. Tall, White, and Faceless without the aid of electromagnetic radiation.

After an indeterminate interval of time, Joslyn had not found Slender, but she had met abruptly with many trees. The last time she managed to walk right into one, she cracked her head against the trunk so hard that she dropped to the ground as the darkness spun dizzyingly around her.

From the whirling darkness, there emerged a spot of white a long way above her head. It hovered against its dark backdrop in unbroken silence, seemingly emitting a faint light of its own. As she watched, dazed and sleepy, it grew nearer until she thought she could reach out and brush it with her fingertips.

Instead, she was roughly picked up in invisible arms.

* * *

Kristen woke to find a tongue on her face and a puppy on her chest.

"Blurgh! Get off, TahQuisha!" She sat up wearily and squinted at the world. "Aw, _expletive_! Where the _expletive_ is Joslyn?"

Vicious made no answer, but she looked very happy to be there.

"Alright, so here is what we're going to do," she instructed the dog. "First, we are going to eat breakfast. Then, we are going to call her cell phone. If that doesn't work, you're going to sniff her out and lead me to her. And when you fail at that, we'll come back and have second breakfast. Got it, TahQuisha?"

"Arf!"

* * *

Joslyn was in a tree.

She didn't know how she had gotten to be in a tree, but there was no two ways about it: she was sitting high in some unfamiliar tree. It was the time of half-light just before the breaking of the dawn—

"Eeewwwww," Kristen's good taste in literature interrupted the narration from far away in the forest.

_Sincerest apologies_, the narrator wrote to Kristen.

Joslyn knew she should probably try to get down from the tree, but two thoughts stopped her. The first was that she had never been this high up in a tree before and may never be again, so she had better experience it fully while she was there. The second thought was that any attempt to climb down would be likely to end in her plummeting to her death, so she did the obvious thing and climbed higher in the tree to get the view from the top.

The view from the top turned out to be one of leaves, so Joslyn climbed back down. She had almost made it back to where she had started when she commenced her previously predicted death plummet. While she was a little surprised to suddenly find herself accelerating towards the earth at a rapid nine point eight one meters per second squared, she was even more surprised by the sudden impulse of her collision with a person before they both became grounded and therefore effectively neutral. Sadly, she realized that her mass—or perhaps her density—had been too great for the buoyant force of the air to significantly slow her down.

_Sorry readers, Joslyn and I have physics final exams in a week_, the narrator inserted as explanation.

Joslyn looked at the figure on whom she had landed. "SLENDER!" she exclaimed triumphantly. "I found you!"

Slender looked back at the familiar figure sitting on his chest and banged the back of his head against the ground.

* * *

It had come back. Why in the name of the hunt had it come back?

Slender had never before left his prey the chance to return to him, but he suspected that none of his other prey would ever be inclined to do so. This one…probably shouldn't count. The peculiarly chatty human had long established that it was by no means typical prey.

Slender had suffered a nasty shock when he had found it stumbling through the forest hours ago. He had hoped—vainly—never to see it or its flame-headed dwelling mate again. And he had hoped—vainly—that by placing it high in that tree, it would be unable to come back down and bother him. He had waited by it through the night, forsaking a precious hunt, to see if it would be adequately contained by the tree.

The tree had failed. He needed to get this forest some better trees.

And now it perched atop him as he lay flat on the ground, unhurt but dismayed, listening to its inane chattering. With one long white finger to its midsection, he pushed it off of him.

"Ow," it protested from its new location on the ground. "I have a bruise there!"

Rising to his feet, Slender sent it a wave of wordless sarcasm meant to express the obviousness of its scratched and bruised state, considering it had gone on a hike sans flashlight and there encountered many trees. These trees he absolved of his previously laid blanket statement of arboreal fail.

* * *

**Author's Other Note: In response to considerable pressure from Kristen and Joslyn, I have posted this first part of a story I intended to be a one-shot. The other part is somewhere within my already-mostly-asleep brain, so it should be written and posted soon. There was no particular reason I wanted to cut it off here other than the fact that I am already 45 minutes past the bedtime Joslyn imposed on me tonight for the sake of my pleasant dreaming, and I had promised Jos and Kris that I would have this up days ago, so I just posted what I got. If you made it this far into it, you might as well leave a review. Flames shall be outshone by the sheer intensity of Kristen's hair.**

**And by the way, Jos and Kris, if you read this and fail to leave me a review, your characters shall regret it in the next installment, mark my words!**


End file.
